I took these notes on a scrap of paper at a coffee shop this afternoon during a needed break from reading. Via the coffeeshop speakers Tom Petty crooned, over over the drumnbass and Fugazi in my headphones, “there ain’t no easy way out,” an instance of pop music truth to rival any others I can think of.
I was a kid at the tale end of the cold war. My grandfather said he kept his guns “in case the Russians invade.” My dad used “you communist!” as a playful epithet. I remember me and my friends loving the movie Red Dawn, where the Russians invade the US. In one scene a downed US fighter pilot watches one of the teenaged US guerillas he’s taken up with carve notches into his rifle for “enemy” soldiers he’s just killed. The pilot remarks, “all that hate’s going to burn you up.” The boy replies, “It keeps my warm.”
I’ve been reading some distressing stuff. The Little School by Alicia Partnoy and The Inferno by Luz Arce, memoirs of detainees in Argentina and Chile, respectively, and the Nunca Mas (”Never Again”) reports for both countries. These reports detail how the dictatorships carried out their systematic kidnappings, tortures, and murder. The reports consist of a lot of detailed first hand testimony, as do the memoirs. I have plans to read the Uruguay and Brazil reports and some corresponding memoirs, but I need a break.
(These reports were on my mind during a recent exchange with Glen in the comments section after Eric’s excellent post to the Long Sunday Tronti symposium [which I’m enjoying immensely]. I used a prison and torture as a metaphor for the working class, how there is a distinction between working class and capitalist class just as much as there is a difference between torturer and prisoner, and that this difference matters politically. Glen replied, quite reasonably, “to destroy the prison means also freeing the guard.” I agree with that some of the time, but other times, as I replied to Glen, “Destruction of the prison doesn’t have to mean liberating the prison guard, if, for instance, the prisoners all got out, blocked the exits, and burnt it down.” That’s not a program I would actually get behind, of course - to do so would be to become just like the enemy - but sometimes … damn.)
This material is hard going. Not like Hegel hard (either “what’s he saying?” or “whoa! my mind is blown!”) but emotionally hard. It’s exhausting. A history written in letters of blood and fire (and often not written at all). I move from anger to sadness to simply tired and shellshocked, in need of a coffee or beer or hot bath. No warming hatred here. Searing, sometimes. Cold ashes other times. But not warming. Roger told an anecdote during discussion of his post to the Tronti discussion, “You know that story about I think it is Max Lieberman, the German artist? He watched the Nazis parade through Berlin in 1933, and he was asked what he thought about it. He said, I don’t have enough money to buy enough food to throw up enough to show you what I think about it.” That says it reasonably well.
I was active in college in Take Back The Night, working on the the after effects of another pervasive form of torture and trying - hoping - to make it a little less likely in the future. My final year I got a job at a campus office dedicated to addressing sex education and sexual assault issues. I worked as a peer educator and victim’s advocate. I put together and facilitated presentations with volunteers and did advocacy and peer counseling for survivors.
When I took the job I was interested in the latter and utterly uninterested in the former. At the time I thought I wanted to become a social worker, to do counseling. I found my initial interests the exact inverse of how I experienced the work. I liked public speaking, designing the presentations, setting them up, coordinating the process. I found the counseling way too much to handle. It would mess with my head for days. I had a really hard time walking way, going back to the rest of my life. I gave up the social worker idea.
After quite a while later I got into organizing. Among the organizers I initially met there was a stigma against the social workers. Organizers aim for systemic change, social workers distribute band aids, that was the attitude (the legacy of Alinsky). This was coupled with a macho attitude that organizers are tough. Organizing is hard, of course, and the lifestyle for paid professional organizers sucks, which is why I got out (not for any political criticism, wish I could say otherwise). But organizers aren’t tough. Nurses are tough, social workers are tough. They deal with fucked up stuff and go on with their lives. Organizers try to prevent fucked up stuff, or retaliate for it, but don’t directly encounter it face to face. A friend of mine is an ER social worker. He told me once about having a kid come in with a bullet hole in his forehead. My friend was the one to tell the family the kid died. That’s tough. What do you do with all this?
The question, of course, is misplaced. You don’t do anything. My interests in Benjamin-style narration of history, history that builds class hatred, is in part an attempt to do something with, to make something of these kinds of experiences. That’s not a wholly misguided urge. At the same time, some things we can’t use. Some things are just losses, not redeemable. (Another point in the constellation of deadtime.) What do you do? You have a drink or partake of some other delivery system for a useful substance (better living through chemistry!) to wash the taste from the mouth and try to take a break so as not to get irrecoverably overwhelmed.